Web/Tech

March 31, 2017

As long as I'm posting about things Niebuhr-related this week, I might as well draw your attention to this weird little story, via Gizmodo. Apparently FBI Director James Comey has Twitter and Instagram accounts, and they are named after Reinhold Niebuhr:

Among the various Comeys, only two of the suggested accounts lacked both real names and profile photos. And only one of these had anywhere near the “nine followers” that James Comey claimed to have. That account was reinholdniebuhr.

Can we be sure? Well the circumstantial evidence in the article is pretty compelling, particularly this:

By senior year, Comey was a double major in religion and chemistry, writing a senior thesis on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and televangelist Jerry Falwell and on his way to the University of Chicago Law School

Hm. Fascinating. Of course, the account is private, so good luck using this information to learn anything about what the FBI knows about Trump and China, or Reinhold Niebuhr for that matter.

June 20, 2013

I have been following the whole controversy regarding the NSA's wiretapping authorities, Edward Snowden's revelations about how far they extend, and what it all means with some interest, but I haven't had a lot to say about it because a) I find a lot of the details to be very cloudy at the moment and b) its the kind of controversy that is more likely to reinforce what people already believe about government, intelligence gathering, and our foreign and domestic policy than to shift anything substantively.

That said, there is no question that the NSA controversy raises some legitimate and troubling issues about the extent to which the War on Terror and the attendant changes in U.S. law has put us in a place where we have sacrificed more of our rights to privacy and protection from illegal searches than we are genuinely comfortable with.

My general opinion about the current NSA scandal is that what makes it scandalous is not that the Obama administration transgressed U.S. law (unlike the Bush Administration's wiretapping scandal of last decade), but precisely that everything that was done was legal. The fact that the legislative conventional wisdom surrounding the use of these new technologies has coalessced around the idea that government may have fairly expansive and intrusive rights over it should be troubling, particularly given the lack of any real public debate about the topic.

There hasn't been any evidence presented to this point that the NSA has granted itself unrestricted access over any and all electronic communications within the United States (let alone that the authority to do so rested with relatively low-ranking operatives like Snowden). As of yet, evidence suggests that the NSA's actions were well within established U.S. precedent regarding electronic communications, insofar as they could gather metadata on who was calling whom, but required a warrant to actually establish wiretaps and other direct forms of electronic surveillance. (Though, it should be noted, others disagree with this).

With regard to foreign surveillance, most of the revelations have been somewhat overwhelming. As Kevin Drum notes:

Snowden has so far presented no evidence that NSA has abused its statutory powers. He obviously doesn't like NSA's statutory powers, but that's a different thing. At one point, for example, he says that the focus on whether NSA is sweeping up domestic communications is a "distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%." Maybe so, but spying on foreigners is NSA's whole reason for existence.

Indeed. You can object to the idea that we have an agency that does such things, but the agency exists and, at least with regard to the subject of foreign surveillance, is certainly doing nothing outside of the bounds of the intelligence gathering game. There might be legitimate objections to the fact that this game is played in the first place, but all the evidence thus far suggests that the game is being played, byt the NSA at least, outside of the United States, where there is no expectation of constitutional protections.

And then there is Snowden himself. While on the one hand, I think it's fair to say that his assertions should be judged on their merit and not with regard to any personal evaluation of Snowden as a person, that's difficult to do when a lot of the most inflammatory charges come from Snowden with little to no documentary evidence to back it up. Every grandiose claim that he makes thus actually undermines his own credibility. When he claims, without providing proof, that he could unilaterally wiretap the President's phone, it is legitimate to question his credibility. When he makes dark insinuations that he may be arrested, murdered, or disappeared, he sounds more overwrought than persuasive. By making himself so much the center of the story, he puts his credibility as a messenger directly in the frame of inquiry. Edward Snowden is not Daniel Elsberg, and the Obama Administration is not the Nixon Administration. It would have been much better if Greenwald and Snowden has made the story less about the whistleblower and more about the documents themselves and what they can be legitimately made to prove. That story might well have been less dramatic, but it still would have been very troubling and worth public discussion.

None of this is to suggest that the erosion of civil liberties and privacy over the last several decades, and particularly since 9/11, is not a very important topic that should be addressed in the most urgent way. I was on record very strenuously calling for the impeachment of George Bush in the wake of his own wiretapping scandal, but instead Congress decided to post facto render legal what the Bush adminstration had done, thus opening the door for much of what Edward Snowden is now alleging the Obama adminstration is doing. I would be much happier to go back to an earlier status quo with a higher standard of evidence required for any kind of intrusion into the electronic privacy of U.S. citizens (wherever they might be), which is why I say that the scandel is that any of this is legal in the first place. But that being the case, what is needed is a renewed sense of the important of individual liberty and a Congress and court system willing to enact legislation protecting that liberty and ensuring that those liberties aren't abused by an overzealous executive branch. But as long as the legal status quo remains as it is, any executive, whether Bush, or Obama, or whoever comes next, will use it to the maximum degree the other branches of government allow. This is putatively the reason for a strong system of checks and balances in the Constitution, and it's unfortunate that this system has been so undermined and abused in recent years.

October 16, 2012

Gawker recently published a profile of Reddit "redditor" Violentacrez, who has apparently become well-known in certain corners of the internet world for trucking in the most vile, racist and misogynist kinds of internet trolling. Apparently Gawker's Adrien Chen was able to track down Violentacrez true identity and confront him about his behavior. The result was a deeply disturbing interview with a deeply disturbed individual. Read it at your own risk. It's pretty disgusting.

However, Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress pivots from the Violentacrez story to consider how a certain kind of geek misogyny (which we've seen far too much of in recent months), was pressaged by none other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly in the person of Warren Meers:

Warren is a decidedly nastier specimen than either Jonathan or Andrew, almost a living incarnation of the more provocative solutions to social insecurity and lack of success with women posited by lonely men online and elsewhere. When we meet Warren, he’s done the magical equivalent of one Reddit user’s suggestion that “one day they’ll bio-engineer a *live* fleshlight. and when it’s not in use, it can be kept in a cage and fed hamster food,” building a robot, April, he uses for sex rather than interacting with a real woman. When he starts dating Katrina, a human woman, he abandons April to run out of batteries, an act tantamount to murder, given that he endowed April with some basic sentience. Later, Warren creates a similar sex robot replica of Buffy that the vampire Spike uses to vent his desire for her—Spike later attempts to assault Buffy, an act of ugly violence that prompts him to reevaluate his life. ...

The Trio’s attacks on Buffy are often manifestations of sexism or sexist desires. They turn her invisible in “Gone,” leaving her voiceless and with limited ability to affect the world around her. They work ugly magical gaslighting on Buffy in “Normal Again,” convincing her that her life and work as a Slayer, the things that make Buffy strong and special, are merely a delusion, a result of severe mental illness that’s left her incarcerated in an institution. And the climactic confrontation between them is sparked when Warren takes steps to address the thing that he hates most about Buffy: that she is more powerful than he is. When Warren fails to equal Buffy magically, he tries to kill her with a handgun, and ends up murdering another woman, Willow’s girlfriend Tara, instead.

Alyssa does a great job tying in the themes that Joss Whedon develops through the character of Warren to the issues of anti-woman geek-ness that have been giving nerddom a bad name these past several months. Her piece is well worth reading.

September 07, 2012

Some months ago, I appeared on a web show called "Different Drummers" that's filmed here in Chicago. At the time, they also asked me to do a commentary based on myChristian Century article "Virtual Good and Evil." From time to time I had wondered what had happened to that commentary. Turns out, it's online!

So if you're interested, here it is. Be kind. I had never used a teleprompter before.

July 04, 2012

At Religion Dispatches today they have a list of recent articles detailing the various ways in which religion, politics, patriotism and partisanship have intersected in the United States recently. If you're looking for something to read this July 4th, go check it out.

July 02, 2012

At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour discusses Ray Kurzweil's evangelizing on behalf of the emergence of "the singularity" as evocative of new religious movements:

Over the last 15 years a brilliant and charismatic self-made man has been campaigning across the United States, describing a near-future event that will deliver human salvation, immortality, and unlimited creative potential. After this event, he claims, the trappings of earthly life will no longer plague us: we will no longer age or get sick; we will be able to create our own worlds to our exact preferences; and we will no longer be restricted to our current physical forms.

This man’s vision has become the center of a growing movement that already has tens of thousands of adherents, dozens of shared texts, and its own non-profit school that aims to “assemble, educate, and inspire a cadre of leaders” to one day “address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill new religious movement, but what makes Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” movement unique is that it doesn’t consider itself religious at all. Singularity Theory holds that technology will continue to grow exponentially until “human” and “digital” forms combine seamlessly.

There are of course a great many parallels between singularity theory and religion, but is singluarlarity theory best understood in terms of religious categories? That's unclear to me. It's an interesting experiment in futurism, and certainly applies well to our strange technological age. Whatever light the theory of religion may shed on the topic, the underlying question of our reliance on technology deserves to me carefully explored from religious, moral, and sociological points of view.

May 20, 2012

There has been an interesting back and forth over the past few days about Nick Hanauer's recent TED talk about the idea of "job creation." Apparently TED had decided not to run the segment, and Hanauer cried "censorship," after which TED decided to go ahead and relase it. You can see the piece above.

The key element of his talk is the following passage, from an editorial he wrote on the topic:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.”

What he says here shouldn't be controversial. It's black letter economic principle: "job creation" come about ultimately through consumer spending, in other words, it's stimulated by demand, so giving ordinary consumers more money to spend has a greater stimulative effect than giving rich people more money to spend, because the rich are probably already spending near the top of their capacity. Giving Nick Hanauer a 10% tax cut won't stimulate the economy nearly as effectively as giving someone with realtively little money one, since Nick Hanauer has almost everything he might need, whereas an ordinary middle class American will take that money and immediately spend it on goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to purchase. Again, really not controversial.

It's become controversial because of the ideological capture of the idea of "job creator" to mean "enormously wealthy." The idea is that the wealthy create jobs through their investments, which to be fair, is true to a point. But the stimulative effect on the economy of low taxes for the rich is far less potent than benefits for the poor and middle class would be. In fact, because the low taxes on the rich have necessitated deep cuts in programs to the poor and middle classes, as well as cuts in education and infrastructure around the country, the low taxes on the wealthy have actually had a counter-stimulative effect. They've actually made the economy worse, or at least, haven't helped it get better.

I'm glad to see Hanauer and a few other members of the hyperwealthy in the United States beginning to push back against this ideology, precisely because, as Hanauer notes, as a matter of social policy, it's not only good for the poor and middle classes, but it is also ultimatley better for the wealthy to live in a well-managed, just, relatively equal society with a well-maintained infrastructure and a sound educational system.

May 09, 2012

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!